My sister-in-law Grace is in town for a little while and staying over at my sister and brother-in-law’s place out in Etobicoke. They live on a nice secluded street in a neighbourhood with old trees and well-kept houses where many young families live. I thought that Grace might find it a little too quiet being there all the time and invited her to come out with me on Saturday night.
“By my standards, it’ll be a fairly low-impact evening, but it’ll give you a chance to get out. You might want that, now that my Eileen’s living in the slow lane.”
“Hah,” said my sister later on, “I’d like to see him try my schedule — getting up at 5:30 a.m., taking care of a little boy, work (she’s a doctor), PAIRO (an doctors’ organization, in which she plays an active role), and keeping house — and then see if he still calls that the slow lane.”
Okay, so it’s a different kind of “fast lane”. It’s just not my kind, at least not now.
I’ll be the first to admit — and I’m certainly not the first to point it out — that good chunks of my life have been rather carefully “constructed” — a term my friend Dera used to describe it — to be a somewhat offbeat one full of interesting and amusing happenings. (I always find it odd that people put so much planning and effort into their careers but somehow expect that the rest of life will simply sort itself out.) I’m sure that when the time comes, I’m going to have to give a little of that up for Joey Jr. — or what ever his or her name will be.
(Or maybe not. Perhaps I’ll be at the forefront of the “strollerpunk” movement.)
So, sis, I take back that bit about slow. You may no longer be the hard-partying vodka-guzzling machine, but you’re now a cooler supervillain than Evil Overmom.
As for me, I think I’ll twist a quote from Augustine:
Give me domesticity…but not yet!